Shanzhai (山寨)

The term Shanzhai (山寨) becomes popular since last year and it generally refers to Chinese knockoffs or pirated brands and goods particularly electronics. You would be surprise to find out that the pirated electronic products such as cell phones, PDAs, DVD players, MP3 and so on are so rampant in China. Last year end when I was in Guilin and a few other nearby cities, I found that faked hand phones were so popular over there. Instead of NOKIA, they have exactly the same model with similar functionalities only with slightly different tag of NCKIA. Instead of iphone, they have similar product calls iOrange. Amazing isn’t, I was stunned when I came to know that the price of the products were not even half of the original ones. In the past we know that the branded handbags, watches, T-shirts and so on were counterfeited, now the Chinese have gone so high tech that even cell phone and other more sophisticated electronic products can be cloned.

I followed a Taiwanese talk show last night that deliberated on the Shanzhai culture in China. It was reported that of the 1.15 billion cell phones sold worldwide in 2007, about 150 million cell phones sold in China the same year were Shanzai products. That means at least one tenth of the cell phones sold in 2007 were fake products from China. That's why the intellectual property is always a big issue in China. But how come the original brands such as Nokia and so on are not taking serious actions on their imitated products? The show offered very good explanations. It seemed that the genuine brands are also aware that the existence of Shanzhai products is a reflection of the current purchasing power of the majority consumers in China. They simply can’t afford the original LV handbags or original Nokia cell phones which cost probably more than double as compared to the Shanzhai alternatives. But Shanzhai products are of inferior quality, the genuine brands are probably taking the opportunity to educate the consumers on the quality aspects of their products. As the purchasing power increases in tandem with the fast growing economy of China, consumers will naturally source for the genuine products which are of better quality and more importantly reflective of their standard of living and lifestyle. You simply can’t go to a LV party carrying a counterfeited LV handbag, don’t you? Your peers will laugh at you.